Upping minimum wage threatens restaurant jobs

Employee Policies Institute predicts the equivalent of 6,000 full-time restaurant jobs in California will be eliminated if the state minimum wage is raised to $8.50 from $8, as proposed by Assembly Bill 10.

Most of those losing hours will be waiters and waitresses.

“If you take a typical restaurant, it has a 3 percent profit margin,” said Michael Saltsman, research fellow at the Employee Policies Institute.

“Restaurants have been seeing their costs going up, and they find it difficult to pass it on to customers in these economic times.”

The nonprofit institute has tracked government data from 50 states for 20 years.

The research found that every 10 percent increase in cash wages reduced the number of hours worked by tipped employees by 5 percent.

If wages go up, restaurants are most likely to schedule servers for fewer hours, Saltsman said.

“When your labor costs go up and you are a low margin business, you have to make hard choices and get more efficient,” Saltsman said.

— Mark Anderson, Nov. 21

Lessons in community journalism

Longtime Sacramento journalist David Watts Barton asserts in an article published this week in the Columbia Journalism Review that without journalism jobs, we don’t have journalism.

“My first national byline. Hard to believe. I hope you think it was worth the wait!” Barton wrote on Facebook.

Barton, a regular guest host of Insight on Capital Public Radio and a Bloomberg correspondent, is another casualty of the struggling journalism industry.

In September, Barton was laid off from his job as editor-in-chief for online newspaper Sacramento Press.

In his Columbia Journalism Review article, Barton shares his observations working at the hybrid online paper, which uses both unpaid amateur writers and professional paid journalists.

“What I Saw at the Hyperlocal Revolution” was published Nov. 17.

While relying heavily on unpaid community contributors, Sacramento Press, under Barton, hired a few professional journalists to give readers a reason to return to the site.

Barton talks about how the journalists “lit a fire under the local news media.”

Long hours and fast writers helped, along with free work from interns and community contributors, he wrote. Still, he said, often the community contributions were weak.

“Despite today’s proliferation of sites that are open to anyone, not everyone is a journalist, let alone a good one,” he wrote.

Ultimately, Barton concludes that much of the article, “which was intended to be about journalism, is instead about money.”

“But this much is still clear, whether for new media or old: Editing costs money. … Without the money, we don’t have jobs. And “citizen journalism” notwithstanding, without journalism jobs, we don’t have journalism.”

— Melanie Turner, Nov. 21

G Street building hits market

A downtown office building is hitting the market with an asking price of $15 million.

The marketing team at Jones Lang LaSalle is taking offers for the seven-story, 50,600-square-foot building at 906 G Street, just north of Sacramento City Hall. It has three floors of office space and three floors of parking as well as ground-floor retail space.

The building, constructed in 1988, is 88 percent leased, primarily to Sacramento County’s District Attorney and Department of Transportation, which have provided a stable tenant base over the past decade.

— Michael Shaw, Nov. 17

Mulvaney’s gets nod from OpenTable

The accolades keep rolling in for Mulvaney’s B&L restaurant in midtown Sacramento.

The restaurant at 1215 19th St. was the only local restaurant to be picked by OpenTable reviews as being among the top in the country making American food.

As a precursor to Thanksgiving, San Francisco-based online reservation company OpenTable honored the top 50 best restaurants in the country serving American food.

Derived from more than 10 million reviews submitted to OpenTable, the restaurants were located in 30 states. Only seven of the restaurants were in California, and Mulvaney’s was the only local one. Mulvaney’s also was one of five local restaurants cited in October by Zagat Survey as a best-rated restaurant.